Trai floats pre-consultation paper on free roaming

Sets deadline of January 17, 2013 for comments on the paper

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today floated a pre-consultation paper seeking inputs from stakeholders on tariff for national roaming services, taking a step ahead towards the proposed free roaming.

The regulator has set deadline of January 17, 2013 for comments on the pre-consultation paper after which it will issue a consultation paper. Based on the Trai recommendations, the Department of Telecommunications will take a final decision on the framework of national roaming.

The government has already announced that free national roaming would be allowed in early-2013.

“Through the pre-consultation paper released today, the regulator has sought inputs from stakeholders on the broad framework of tariff for National Roaming Services so as to enable authority to prepare a detailed comprehensive consultation paper,” Trai said in a statement.

Trai has sought views of stakeholder on different aspects of National Roaming Services, such as the cost components of call rates to be considered, ‘the manner of recovery of cost in case of incoming calls are to be made free’, tariff for video calls and SMS while roaming, need for permitting special tariff vouchers for roaming customers.

Earlier, telecom operators have strongly opposed free roaming saying that they will lose more than Rs 13,500 crore if roaming is abolished. The nationwide free roaming was announced as part of the National Telecom Policy 2012 that was approved in May this year. As part of the One Nation – Free Roaming plan, consumers will not have to pay the hefty roaming changes while they are travelling out of their home telecom circle.

As per the industry estimates, free roaming would benefit about 12% of the total mobile users in the country. There are about 900 million wireless subscribers in the country till October, according to data published by Trai. Currently, the average roaming charge is 75 paise per minute to Re 1 per minute.

At present, telcos have to pay various charges like termination charge, interconnect charges for completing call of their customers on to other networks which get added to the final cost of a call for customers.

According to Trai, the tariff for Nation Roaming Services was last specified by it on January 24, 2007. “The access deficit charges regime has been phased out in 2008 and termination charges lowered from Rs 0.30 to Rs 0.20 per minute in year 2009,” Trai said in a statement.